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Before we left Seattle, we arranged to go on a helicopter tour. I spoke with the nice folks at Inter-Island Helitours and found that the weather had been poor, but was supposed to clear up and get nice in a few days, so I arranged for a helitour on Wednesday. After that, I watched www.weather.com for the Kauai weather report and saw that pretty much every day it said the weather would be nice in a couple of days. Finally, the day of our scheduled flight arrived, and it still looked like it would be nice in a few days. Of course the weather changes from minute-to-minute, and also as you travel around the island, so we had a long discussion with the folks at Inter-Island and ultimately decided to go for it.
We took off from the coastline, then headed inland over the sugar cane fields to Waimea Canyon. We bumped through some turbulence and all of the tourists grabbed for handholds. After we had lifted up over the canyon and been shown the beginnings of the stunning views, the pilot pointed out that things would most likely get even bumpier as we proceeded north and asked if we wanted to continue or give up and not be charged for the flight. At that point, there was no way any of us would be the first to admit we were scared silly and deprive the rest of the group of the views. Once he had the go-ahead from all of us, he took us down into the canyon and showed us some amazing views.
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From Waimea Canyon, we headed down to the Na Pali coast. The weather got bumpier, the rain started streaming across the windshield and the views got even better. Lush steep valleys lead down to the rugged coast, like what we had seen on the Big Island but more so.
The rain that we 4-wheeled through the previous day, along with the plenty more where that came from, have been feeding many waterfalls throughout the island. A little further up the coast, we were treated to a symphony of waterfalls all fed by the recent rains.
From there we saw many more waterfalls, an impressive mudslide that the pilot said had happened in the last few days, and lots of rain and clouds. The pilot was forced to make several detours because of the low cloud cover. As we returned to the southern part of the island, we broke out of the clouds and got a nice view of Hanapepe and the surrounding coastline.
The pilot landed the chopper back on the trailer from which he took off, unloaded us and gave me the "Hang Loose" gesture as I snapped this photo him and his "machine."
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